Ellie Holmes is a commercial women's novelist, expert juggler and occasional lion tamer because that to do list never gets any shorter, does it?!

Author: ellieholmesauthor

As some of you will be aware I have recently been reading Julia Cameron’s ‘The Right to Write’ book which I highly recommend to all writers. There are nuggets to be enjoyed in every chapter. You will, inevitably, recognise yourself in Julia’s wise words, nodding and smiling wryly as you read.

One of the concepts that Julia introduced me to was the idea of ‘artist’s dates’. We are all familiar with going on dates but we don’t normally take ourselves on one – alone. Here, you do just that.

You choose a day that suits and an activity you know you will find interesting, fascinating or stimulating and off you go. Just you alone. This is a special time for you to commune with your inner self or as Julia puts it you are ‘romancing, wooing, courting your creative self’.

Date Time

You could go to see a play or a movie. You could visit a museum or take in an exhibition. You could go to or take part in a glass blowing demonstration or a workshop on how to make mosaics. You could knit, sew, crochet, draw or paint. You could listen to a talk on a subject of interest or visit a historic landmark. Take a walk in an ancient wood or along an unfamiliar coast line. The only limits are the ones you place on yourself.

Julia suggests going on these excursions once a week to refill the creative well. With a busy schedule, once a week is a little optimistic for me but I have been achieving an artist’s date once a fortnight and it has been an uplifting and inspiring experience. We’re in the grip of winter in the UK so my activities have been largely based indoors: an exhibition of black and white photos, a mindfulness meditation session, an exhibition of landscape paintings and a past life regression. I am looking forward to the spring when I can widen my horizons further.

Whilst I have no definite plans to include any of the things I have done or seen in future stories I am pretty certain they will filter down into a work in progress at some stage and I will be excited to see how that turns out. In the meantime, now that I know the joy and freedom of an artist’s date, they will remain a firm addition to my calendar.

That was the title of a competition being run by a newspaper in the UK. Being a 100,000 word kind of girl my immediate reaction was that it would be impossible to craft a story, a proper story, in just one hundred words (excluding the title). Intrigued I read the piece and the example that accompanied it. It was the flashiest of flash fiction. Entertaining and intriguing. Popcorn for the mind.

I turned the page and moved on. Except, I couldn’t. The article kept popping back into my head while I was doing the washing up or driving to work. It was impossible, surely? But could I do it? No! A story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Characters introduced and ushered into action. A resolution. Could I really distil all of that into a fraction of the word count I normally employ?

The gauntlet had been thrown down. The competitor in me could not resist. I simply had to give it a go.

I didn’t even entertain writing the story in my normal genre of romantic fiction. I felt something this brief needed action, danger, a perilous situation, something to grab the attention and get the blood pumping. I let my creative mind off the leash and let it play in the mud for a while, this is what it came up with:-

Humanity

Alexandro turned the Navy launch’s spotlight as a shape loomed out of the darkness.

The small vessel didn’t look capable of crossing a river, let alone the Mediterranean as it pitched and rolled in the unforgiving swell.

Drawing alongside, Alexandro could see the boat was a tableau of misery. A woman, clothes shredded by her journey, was preparing to jump.

‘No!’

Alexandro clutched at her, seeking her arms, missing, grabbing only a handful of rags instead. As she disappeared beneath the water, he was astonished to see her smile.

Following on from last week’s blog about remembering that writing is meant to be fun, I took a look at my own writing world – several works in progress at different stages of completion, a desk covered in notes about Pinterest boards to be created, advertising campaigns to organise, podcasts to listen to and articles to read. A tsunami of to-do-lists and to-finish-lists. Is it any wonder that I’ve lost touch with the joy that used to sit at the heart of my writing?

Fun, Fun, Fun!

I decided enough was enough, it was time to put the fun back into writing. When I catch myself being far too serious I find the best way to jolly myself out of it is to write. Not the work in progress. Not even something that might become a work in progress but something completely new, of the moment, to be created, enjoyed and left.

Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction usually does it for me. I have a dictionary of phrase and fable (a guaranteed rabbit hole to disappear into if you want to lose an hour) which I open at a random page, stab my finger down and whatever it points to, I give myself 500 or 1,000 words to write a piece of flash fiction that incorporates it. If the dictionary isn’t near at hand, I’ll use a magazine instead. It’s amazing the kind of subjects you can find yourself writing about when a copy of Cosmopolitan is close by!

The beauty of this exercise is that you are free – forget genres, forget writing styles, forget targets and plans. Just flex your creative muscle and see where it leads you. You might be a romantic novelist who writes in the third person by day but for this exercise you might find yourself writing gothic horror in the first person. A literary heavyweight could discover their comic alter ego, a chick lit aficionado could let out her gory crime other self. The point is to let yourself go, to have FUN.

Forget the rules, forget who you think you are as a writer and just write. You will be amazed where it takes you and when it’s time to put the games away and get back to the work in progress you will hopefully find having let your creative self off the leash for a bit, you return to your work energised and re-engaged.

I belong to a writing group and I suggested that we each write out our writing resolutions for the year and read them aloud to the group. I then collected them in and said I would bring them out again at our mid summer social event so we could all check in with how we were doing and once more at our Christmas get together to hold the Inquest into whether we had hit all our targets and if not, why not.

I made several writing resolutions of my own, the last of which is “To remember that writing is meant to be fun”.

Where did the fun go?

It is all too easy to forget this when a once innocent past time that gave us so much joy in the early days morphs into a career with all the attendant pressures that come with deadlines and running a business.

A writing friend gave me Julia Cameron’s ‘The Right to Write’ book to read. If you haven’t read it do get hold of a copy, I promise you will not be disappointed. It is written in such an engaging and open way that you are quickly transported to Julia’s world but at the same time you recognise yourself in her words. I found myself muttering ‘That’s me, I do that.’ and, often, ‘I thought it was just me who felt like that.’

Julia is a pro who has been there and done it and got the scars to prove it. Along with a lot of practical advice and good dollops of common sense, Julia reminded herself and us that writing is meant to be fun. Such a simple statement and yet so easy to overlook in the tangle of our everyday writing lives.

If writing has become a slog or a duty to be performed rather than an activity to be enjoyed, those feelings of disengagement and disillusionment will filter down through the words on the page. If we’re doing it because we think we should and the heart is a bystander the reader will be able to tell.

Writing is a passionate, visceral, all encompassing relationship between the writer and the page. If we’re dialling the work in, it will show and we won’t be capable of producing our best work.

If that sounds like you, take a step back from the work in progress and cast your mind back to when writing was fun.

What’s changed? Perhaps you had the innocence of naïvety to sustain you, the expectation that a big deal was just around the corner. Now, the school of hard knocks has taught you otherwise. Perhaps it’s the work itself that is the problem, are you stuck in a rut, writing a particular book because you think you should when your heart yearns to be writing something completely different.

If you can stand back and look at the wider landscape you should be able to see why you are not completely engaging with your writing and, more importantly, what you can do to recapture the joy and bring it back to your work.

One of the things Julia reminded me of as I read her book is that writing is meant to be fun. Somewhere along the road from writer to published writer to authorpreneur I forgot the fun bit. Writing had become targets and deadlines, pressure and stress.

Rediscovering the joy in my writing is one of my resolutions for 2018.

I could not have reconnected with this fundamental piece of advice at a better time. Following the publication of one of my short stories in a women’s magazine towards the end of last year, the editor of another women’s magazine emailed me with a proposal – how would I feel about writing a three-part serial for her publication. She wanted a romantic mystery that ran to 3,500 words with a cliffhanger after 1,000 words (the first edition), a second cliffhanger after 2,000 (the second edition) and all tied up neatly in the final 1,500 (the third edition).

With the mantra that ‘writing is fun’ running through my mind, I set to work. What came out of it was Midnight at Moon Bay, the first part of which is published in Yours Magazine in the UK this week and is on sale now.

I thoroughly enjoyed writing Midnight and I hope, if you get the chance, you’ll enjoy reading it.